Grief hurts. It cuts, slices, maims, destroys, leaving bloody gaping wounds. We wait for something, anything to relieve it, make it disappear with a wave of a magic wand.
Bandages of distraction offer temporary relief. When removed, a scar remains.
Sometimes the wound oozes, infection sets in and threatens to poison the entire system. Medication , prescribed or self administered, takes the edge off. But the primary dis-ease persists.
Our loved one has died, yet grief lives on. Like the clown in the gutter, it comes back to taunt us despite our best efforts to banish it.
Like a cancer, it hides deep in our psyche, fooling us into believing we have conquered it, only to jump out like a scary clown jack in the box when the correct triggering tune is played.
That’s grief. It never really leaves, you learn to live with it. Or survive with it, as it may be.
Recognizing triggers is one thing. Avoiding them, another.
For me the holiday season is my 3 month never ending trigger when the pain assaults me at every turn. Herculean effort of mental gymnastics is required daily from Halloween to New Year’s when I wake up and gratefully shout “It’s over !!!”
This year brings a new realization that those happy holidays are dead, they died with John, as did my family. Dead and gone, buried and rotted, never to return, they are as the Lollipop guild sand, “really most sincerely dead”.
It’s time to stop beating the horse. I’ve been hoping and wishing and praying for 8 years that my holidays would somehow miraculously return like a Hallmark Movie. Fences would mend, misunderstandings corrected, forgiveness and hugs all around and a joyful chorus of carols as soundtrack.
But that is not to be, ever. Never ever. Not gonna happen. All attempts have been met with cold silence and no little angel will appear to show us the way to a wonderful life.
Over the river and through the woods leads to my comfy country home in rural Maine. There’s no place like home for the holidays.
I’ll be home for Christmas. Alone. With my dogs.
That’s the cold hard truth. It hurts, it sucks, and I wish it wasn’t so. But it is, and this is the year that I put on my big girl panties and push the jack back into his box and slam the lid. Hit the road, Jack.
Way back in the day when I was a super catholic Director of Religious Education in my parish, using nursery rhymes and songs to teach the faith to kids was very effective.
One of my favorites, that my own kids can still recite, is sung to tune of “Old McDonald Had A Farm” and teaches the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
"There are 5 things I must do to make a good confession
Know, know know my sins (sing 3 times)
Be sorry for my sins (3 times)
then "tell my sins to the priest"(3 times)
then "do, do, do my penance" (3 times)
then "Try not to sin again" (3 times)
To make a good confession.
I’ll confess, I still run this song in my head when I go to confession.
Here’s another confession: I’m not sure any of this stuff is real. I truly do not know what I truly believe in my heart and mind about God.
I’m no longer a super Catholic. I left the church around 2009 because my son came out to me as gay, and it didn’t jibe with what the Church taught.
That decision led me to read and study everything about ancient gods, mythology, the psychology of religion, Church history and on and on until I came to a logical conclusion: it’s all a myth. Untrue. Fairy tales that make us behave.
John followed me out of Catholicism after reading what I showed him and reaching the same conclusion.
This cradle Catholic guy, St. Gregory’s Catholic School alum, former altar boy, the guy who insisted we attend Mass on our honeymoon, the guy who had a major reversion after living Cursillo (as did I) – the guy who gathered his family for the rosary every night during Lent – the guy who fasted on Fridays and took the Divine Mercy devotion to heart, counted on it every year-
This guy walked away and did not look back. Maybe he did ? Who knows what went on between him and God in those last months of his life. Not me. If John was greasing the hinges on Heaven’s Gate with remorse , he never talked to me about it.
So we enjoyed about 4 blissful years of freedom Catholic guilt, no dogma, no rules. We didn’t become heathens, we became kinder. Less judgmental. More accepting of ideas other than our own. Open minded.
We were happy. At peace. Living in the moment, not constantly repenting for transgression. No hair shirts for us. My chain of medals, scapular, rosary all went in a drawer. Down came the statues, the holy water fonts, the huge wall rosary. Yup, we were super Catholics for sure.
But no more.
Fast forward to 2015 and John is diagnosed with brain cancer. Stage 4. Terminal. Given months to live.
The promises of prayers poured into my Facebook, calls and cards carried the same, , .I politely thanked everyone while silently , and privately, shaking my head and my fists to whoever set up this “pray to play” scam.
The way I saw it was this: if enough prayers were offered for John’s recovery, then he would be cured. If not, so sorry, you lose, game over.
So how many is enough to satisfy God and make Him reconsider, to convince Him to give John a pass ?
We must have not reached the requirement. There was no miracle. No cure. No John rising from his hospital bed, throwing of his sheets, and marching right on out of there to preach the Good News.
There was no good news. Only death.
And as agnostic/non believers/atheists we thought that was the end.
…..and soon you’ll be walking cross the floor, and soon you’ll be walking out the door.
John wasn’t much of a book reader. He never understood how I could finish several books a month.
But certain topics , usually marine related, grabbed his interest and led him to read about them. He devoured Philbrick’s book about whaling on Nantucket and Linda Greenlaw’s Maine lobstering books.
But once bitten by the hiking bug, he read “A Walk in the Woods” and began forming a dream of walking the Appalachian Trail. He and our daughter Meg were planning some practice overnight hikes for the summer of 2015.
But the universe had other plans which did not include any more hiking for John. In July 2015 the beast of GBM came like a thief in the night and stole his dreams, his health, his future, and his life.
We buried John on Columbus Day 2015. A week later I took a very long walk from our home in Scituate, through the harbor area where John’s mail route had been, and up a hill to his grave.
I was hoping to clear my head, just enough to try and make some sense of what the hell happened in 3 months.
The only message I got that day was I need to keep going. Put one foot in front of the other. One step at a time.
So I did. Walking through the gorgeous fall foliage, the scent of dying leaves, the descent of a New England winter, the changing of seasons, life and death played out in nature got me through those first dark months.
In April 2016 I found myself on the Appalachian Trail, joining a group doing 5 parts of it in 5 different states over a week. Carrying John’s Red Sox cap in my pack, every step was for him. He would walk the Appalachian Trail posthumously.
Eight years later now in 2023 my head is no clearer. It’s even more muddled. A thousand million questions and no satisfying answers run through it daily.
So I’m going to take a long walk and try to figure it out . No, let me restate that. I’m going to take a long walk and see what happens.
There was the very intelligent, well written “Twilight Zone” from Ron Serling. A time transcending classic series, each episode questioning reality without a firm and rational conclusion, but a question.
Then there were the knockoffs, the Saturday afternoon fare lost in the static on UHF. The Outer Limits and One Step Beyond were the B class to the networks’ prime time line-up
The intro to The Outer Limits told us what to expect. A god-like, sobering, authoritative male voice warned and instructed us:
“There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image; make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: there is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to the outer limits.”
This is a post about adjusting our television sets. About changing our focus.
…About participating in a great adventure.
…About taking one step beyond our outer limits.
…About overcoming obstacles and jumping hurdles.
…About pushing ourselves beyond the script.
…About asking questions and multiple choice answers.
…About warnings and instructions , rules and dogma.
…About changing what we can and making peace with the rest.
This is post # 1 of Year 8 of my nightmare.
This is the beginning of the end I write myself, refusing to allow anyone to tell me what I can and cannot accomplish.
This is where I take the reigns back and reclaim my power, where I click my heels on my hiking shoes and remind myself I had the power all along.
This is my come back, my reentry to life. To being alive and having dreams.
I was well into my thirties before I even heard this phrase.
Not “either/or………….but both/and”
It was spoken by a monsignor teaching a class I was taking for the RCAB (Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston) catechetical certification. The context had to have been theological, and although I don’t remember the topic I am sure his words enraged me.
Because, remember, I used to be a “Super Catholic”, dogmatic, rigid, unbending in my beliefs and sure as hell that’s where anyone who didn’t share them would end up. The sense of moral superiority was a drug – but that’s another post.
Back then I saw everything as black and white. Heaven or hell. Good or evil. Hot or cold.
With eternity at stake, being on the fence about anything religious was risky. Choose sides, follow the leader, whatever the Church says, whatever the Pope says (as long as he’s speaking ex…
Healing and forgiveness go together. You can’t heal if you don’t forgive.
What does it mean to forgive someone who has hurt you ?
Intentionally hurt you. Treated you cruelly. Treated you badly. Ripped your heart out. Destroyed your self image, made you doubt your own sanity. Gas lighted you into thinking you were worthless. Tore you down. Cut you down. Told lies about you. Beat you with their hateful words. Left you to wallow in pain and suffering when you needed love and comfort.
What forgiveness is not:
….pretending the hurt did not happen
….taking responsibility for the actions of another
…blaming yourself
….believing you deserved it
…making excuses for them
….being “OK” with what they did for whatever reason
What forgiveness is:
…accepting the hurt was real and intentional
…allowing yourself to feel the pain
…refusing to be a victim
…letting it go
Wait, “let it go” ? How ? Why ?
Letting go means the pain and humiliation no longer control you.
Letting go means you will never forget – how could you ?
But you choose to rise above the hurt and claim your humanity and sanity.
You choose to live in peace.
Letting go means that you understand the one who hurt you was hurt themselves. Hurters hurt others. They act out their own pain and humiliation, repeating the actions they swore they would never repeat. They do unto others what was done unto them, for the worse.
Hurters don’t understand themselves, they don’t know themselves. Their deep wounds ooze, unhealed, infecting others – sometimes unwittingly. Sometimes intentionally. Always to help themselves somehow heal from their own pain. This is what we must understand if we are to practice forgiveness.
They know not what they do. On a deep level, they do not know what they do.
Jealousy, anger, abandonment, betrayal, grief, shame – they lay dormant in our souls, virulently multiplying until they find a way to be expressed.
Sometimes the volcano erupts and the hot lava lands on innocent bystanders. Sometimes it is directed toward those who trigger our unhealed wounds.
We are all guilty of this. Outward saints and obvious sinners. We project our wounds onto the world, knowingly and subconsciously.
To forgive means to understand that we are all broken, hurt, grieving, sad, hopeless, abandoned, unloved on some level. We are all human.
Forgiveness means accepting out frailty, accepting others’ limitations and the mistakes they make. It means allowing ourselves, and others, to be human.
For Christians celebrating Good Friday today, the example of Jesus could not be clearer. Misunderstood, labeled, libeled, accused, betrayed. Beaten. Convicted. Nailed to a cross. The innocent Lamb of God.
Beside him, criminals seemingly guilty and deservingof the punishment he received. We never hear their testimony.
We do hear Jesus forgive the, promising them that “today you will be with me in Paradise”. He extends the gift of forgiveness to them, graciously, generously, without question. He knows the frailty, pain, anger and desperation that brought them to their end.
On this Good Friday, I will try to understand and forgive those who have nailed me to my cross. I will try to graciously and generously offer them peace and forgiveness.
The onslaught begins around December 29. Stores clear out the refuse of Christmas and begin to fill the shelves.
Suddenly there are red hearts everywhere you look.
Like Phil the Groundhog, you see your shadow and face six more weeks of holiday heartache. This is the premium stuff, the high test, the kind of pain where you ugly cry in your car after your grocery runs. The aisles of red, the roses, the chocolates – it’s all just too much.
Those lovely rounded hearts are a far cry from your own broken heart.
Your heart looks and feels like a sledgehammer hit it relentlessly , smashing it to sharp tiny fragments. Slivers that cut. A heart of glass, not Cinderella’s slipper.
Your Prince Charming has become Sleeping Beauty, and if only – if only – a kiss would wake him. But he sleeps forever. This fairy tale has no happy ending. You did not live happily ever after and ride off into the sunset to find another adventure. No, the story has ended.
Meanwhile you wander the ruins of your castle, your hut, and it no longer feels like home. No one to cook for, no one to care for, no one to love. No one to care for you, no one to love you. In your own little corner, in your own little chair.
You physically ache, your body cries out to be held and comforted by your person, the one person in this whole wide world who could say the right words, or say nothing – to make it better. Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the saddest of them all ?
Your person is dead. You wish you were dead. You feel dead. Like the original Grimm version of the Snow White tale, where the evil queen is forced into a pair of red hot shoes and made to dance in them until she falls down dead. Yeah, that sounds about right.
Your life source has been extinguished. Your well has run dry.
The Beatles were right: Love is all you need.
Love is all you need, love is all you want.
The walking clueless, those with intact relationships, families, someone waiting for them when they get home – encourage you to try and find love again.
But you know lightening doesn’t strike twice, you have only one soulmate. You have know true love and accept no substitutes. Romeo , Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo ?
And your broken heart yearns for a connection to someone who can give you what you need.
…..someone to listen without judging
….someone to hold you and allow you to feel without trying to fix
….someone who can make you laugh while you cry
….someone who knows you and your history so you don’t have to explain it all
….someone who thinks you are beautiful with no makeup, bed head, bad breath and chicken pox.
….someone who will never ever ever betray you
….someone you can depend on to be there even in the worst of times
….someone whose heart will break into a million shattered slivers without you.
Your person. Your soulmate. Your Prince Charming.
He was here. He loved you, you loved him, and he’s gone. He didn’t eat the poison apple, but he died anyway.
No box of chocolate, no rose, no Hallmark card can make a dent in your despair.
No stranger on a dating site can even begin to fill the void.
So you remember the love, relive the moments of your life when love was the air you breathed. You are grateful for it all, even the pain, because without it you may have taken it all for granted.
My late husband loved maps. Physical paper maps. Not GPS, not Google directions – those were not to be trusted. Only a hard copy, the bigger the better, would do. Multi page fold out Trip Tick from AAA size.
Getting from Point A to Point B with a map is just 2 simple steps :
Choose a route
, and go. Car, train, bus, plane, or hike. Just go.
If only life were that simple.
But it’s not.
Things happen. Plans are derailed, postponed, cancelled.
One day you’re cruising along, windows down, belting out tunes with the wind in your hair, not a care.
Next day you hit a roadblock, run out of gas, get a flat, and only static on your radio.
Unexpected traffic delays your arrival time. Roadside attractions grab your attention and distract you from your destination.
You get lost on the freeway, take a wrong exit. Your destination becomes unclear.
You wonder where you are, how to get back on track, where did you put that map ?
Pull over, get a grip.
There it is, fallen under the seat. Covered with muffin crumbs and coffee stains. The map. Now, where am I ? Turn it this way, turn it that way. Observe your surroundings. Look for signs. Ah, yes.
You are here.
This is a blog about grief, so let’s get to it.
You had a map. You had a plan.
You and your person were cruising along, not a care.
Then life threw you a curveball and you lost your way.
Your copilot – your person – has been ejected from his seat next to you.
You are on your own. It’s up to you to land this plane safely – to drive this car home – to get this train back on track.
A week I used to look forward to with joy, now I face with dread.
I haven’t used a real calendar since John died. No reason to. Nothing worth marking down. No days to anticipate or remember. Those are forever carved into my psyche, my body reminding me despite efforts to forget.
I will turn 62 on July 4. I am a Yankee Doddle Dandy, a real live niece of my Uncle Sam, born on the 4th of July.
I’ve always hated my birthday. Holiday babies resent being lost and overshadowed. Having had my fill of red, white, and blue birthday cakes by the time I reached puberty, I made my husband John promise he would never get me another.
My parents, god bless them, always told me the fireworks and parades were in my honor. I never quite believed it, but the love behind that is duly noted.
My favorite animal is the beaver. Strange, yes, but I am intrigued by their engineering abilities and ability to hold their breath for 15 minutes ! John gifted me every available stuffed beaver to be found on the South Shore of MA before we were married. He even found me little miniature glass and pewter beaver figurines. Very special.
Beaver hut
Once married, despite babies and bills and 60 hour work weeks, my John managed to make my birthdays special. He would crawl home , an hour commute with no A/C from long, hot days cutting fish or delivering mail in Boston, arriving home just in time to shower and hit the mall before it closed, searching for the perfect gift and a cake for me.
When the babies were old enough, he would pile them in the car for the trip to Hanover – or the big time, Braintree !!!! Malls for the hunt. What can we get for Mom this year ?
Post marriage, appliance gifts were a no-no, a tough lesson for the guy whose Mom oohed and ahhed over a new coffee maker every Christmas.
Pool floats were always a hit when we had our second hand above ground pool. Blowing them up without a pump was another loving act left to John.
Returning home , the calls of “Shut your eyes” and “Don’t look in the fridge” while the kids ran upstairs to hide the booty are some of my fondest memories.
Those days are gone. Forever.
Our last July 4th weekend went like this:
July 3rd cookout at our daughter Heidi’s house in Bedford, MA. John developed major eye inflammation and looked like he had gone 10 rounds in a boxing ring. Red faced, congested, watering eyes, we thought maybe he was allergic to something in Heidi’s yard ?
But that was only the beginning.
July 4th, my birthday. John wanted to get me a bike so we could start biking together, but the shop was closed. We planned to try out some bikes for size later that week. We went for a hike with Carley in the woods near our house, our son John accompanying us. He would snap the last photo of us out enjoying nature and each other, forever capturing John’s goofiness.
Later we would have a small cookout with John’s famous burgers, but before that he needed an nap and complained of a major headache. “Don’t worry” I replied to our oldest, “He gets them all the time”.
July 5th, our oldest daughter’s boyfriend flies into Logan from Minnesota to meet us for the first time. John works a full, hot day delivering mail, then we all go out for dinner. As we arrive, John stumbles getting out of the car (Just the heat, he claims) and as we wait for a table he says he feels dizzy. I insist he sit. We enjoy an uneventful meal but when we get home, John is exhausted and goes directly to bed.
Fast forward 3 days to the “Day Everything Changed”, July 8, 2015:
Our daughter, her boyfriend, and myself head down to the harbor to pick up some snacks and lunch for a morning at the beach. We run into John delivering his mail, all seems fine as we exchange hellos – but later, he will have no memory of this.
After a nice morning at the beach, Gayle and Joe head off to Boston for Red Sox game and dinner in the North End. Awaiting John’s return from work, I chill on the deck and anticipate a nice quiet evening alone, just the 2 of us.
He rides up the street on his bike after a long, hot day delivering mail. He rolls over the grass and puts the bike in the shed, as usual.
Then the shit hit the fan. Details are in another blog post, but he suffered a grad mal seizure. Suffered another in the ambulance n the way to the hospital, where tests showed a brain tumor which turned out to be Stage 4 Glioblastoma Multiforme.
July will never be the same for me. All the red, white, and blue – all the parades, all the fireworks – all the cake and ice cream – no more happy birthdays. No more I love you’s.
as Van Morrison sang –
“You can take it (all the tea in China)
and put it in a big brown bag for me,
sail it all round the 7 oceans,
throw it into the middle of the deep blue sea.”
The day I was born has morphed into the day I died. Bye, bye, Miss American Pie.
The person I was – Margie Rice Ohrenberger – daughter, sister, wife, mother, friend, human being – has become Margie Rice Ohrenberger: Widow.
A title I hold with mixed pride and extreme sadness. Proud that I survived what I thought would kill me. Sadness that the life I worked so hard to achieve is just a memory.
Ying/Yang – black/white – happy/sad – birth/death – you can’t have one without the other.
As a widow, the phrase “lost my husband” sounds strange to me.
As in, “he was just here a minute ago, now where on earth did I put him ?”
To lose: to be defeated
“sorry for your loss” -. Death as loss -a deprivation of life, something that cannot be recovered.
Those overused condolences leave me wondering —
Who won, then ? What was the score ? Any good plays ? Hail Mary passes ? What a game that was !!!!
Lost: unable to be found; missing. Not in its right place.
To be lost, first person: I am lost. I am unable to find my way.
Five and a half years into this journey of widowhood, I find myself a bit lost.
Find myself. Lost.
Remember that old TV series “Lost” – a planeful of strangers crashes on a desert island, and while trying to survive they discover their past and future lives intertwined.
My past and future lives – along with of those of every single person encountered on this trip – woven together by the universe in some sort of indecipherable cosmic pattern .
Lost in time.
Lost in space.
Lost like Timmy in the woods.
Occasionally dots are connected , revealing a bit of the puzzle. More often, though, mismatched pieces are rearranged repeatedly without fitting.
My map has been crumpled into a ball and tossed into the circular file. The goal posts have been moved so often, the rules rewritten, time outs and overtime are the norm. What game is this again ?
Oh yeah. The game of LIFE. If only it were as simple as spinning the big wheel , moving ahead in my little plastic car with my tiny plastic pin people, over green plastic mountains around the board. A clear beginning and a clear end. A quick game and it goes back in the box – to be played again when the mood strikes. No cost, no loss. Just fun.
The real game of life is chock full of cost. No pain, no gain. No cross, no crown. No rain, no flowers.
A Widow's Walk 